In the days of the SNES and Mega Drive it wasn’t uncommon for games released in Japan to never see a release in Western markets. That has slowly changed with most games now getting worldwide releases even if there is sometimes a few months delay. The Japanese games market isn’t getting any bigger, and developers and publishers need to maximize sales whenever possible. Targeting the big European and U.S. markets makes a lot of sense.

So it comes as a big surprise that one of the most anticipated Japanese RPGs of 2011 is not getting a release outside of Japan.

Mistwalker’s The Last Story has been a long time coming, but finally gets released in Japan on January 27. Why is there so much excitement for this game? Well, it’s an RPG developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who originally created Final Fantasy (more recently he’s released Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey). It has a lot of elements, even including the logo design, that remind of Final Fantasy, and it has a real-time combat system which a lot of Western gamers would appreciate.

But for the moment there are no plans for this game to ever reach Western shores. According to a publisher representative asked about other territories, the response was simply, “We have no plans at present”.

Japanese RPGs are always problematic to import as they use text so heavily. Unless you speak Japanese it’s going to be a very tough playthrough.

The decision not to bring this game to Western markets seems to have been made by the publisher, which in this case is Nintendo. So there’s little chance that any localization work will be done unless Nintendo can have its mind changed. We’d be really surprised if Mistwalker weren’t upset about this decision.

Reader Comments

toxiceye

I’ve greatly anticipated and am disappointed at this decision. I’m hopeful that this is a temporary choice and it will be altered in the near future. Everything Sakaguchi does should be released in as wide a market as possible, ESPECIALLY with the apparent collapse of SquareEnix and the FF brand.